Document of the Month 12/25: A Judeo-Persian Letter from Bamiyan
“The Pain of Separation from the Lord”: A Personal Letter to the Son of a Jewish Magnate in Bamiyan
by Ruben S. Nikoghosyan
This month’s document, NLI Ms.Heb.8333.207=4, is a personal letter in Early Judeo-Persian, currently kept in the National Library of Israel (Figure 1). It is one of the documents that have emerged from Afghanistan in the past few decades, belonging to the cache known as the “Bamiyan Papers” 1 or the “Afghan Geniza”. It has been digitized and made available to the public in the framework of the “Ktiv” project,2 and is part of the Invisible East corpus.
Fig. 1: NLI, Ms.Heb.8333.207=4 recto. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Israel. “Ktiv” Project.
Jewish letters from Cairo to Khotan
Since the discovery of the Cairo Geniza in the 1890s and of the earliest known Judeo-Persian letters in Dandan Uiliq (near Khotan, Xinjiang, in modern-day China) in 1901, thousands of Jewish letters have come to light that illuminate the socio-economic life of medieval Jewish communities in the Eastern Mediterranean, Iran, India, and beyond. In the past few decades, a group of documents known as the Bamiyan Papers or the Afghan Geniza, has further extended this geographical range to include modern-day Afghanistan. Although nowhere near as large as the Cairo Geniza, this sizeable cache is extremely important for understanding the history of the Jewish community in what is now Afghanistan, as well as the broader life of the region in the pre-Mongol period.
What is Judeo-Persian?
Judeo-Persian is an umbrella term for all varieties of Persian texts written in the Hebrew script. Surviving texts in Judeo-Persian are divided between pre- and post-Mongol periods. Pre-Mongol (Early) Judeo-Persian documents present us with a variety of Persian that is not internally uniform and is significantly different from Classical Persian.3 They contain precious information on the development of Early New Persian in Iran and Afghanistan, and contribute significantly to our understanding of the daily and cultural life of the Jewish communities there. In contrast to Late Judeo-Persian, one needs to have close familiarity with the history of the Persian language to be able to fully understand Early Judeo-Persian, as it has many archaic linguistic features that sometimes bring it closer to Middle Persian.
Post-Mongol (Late) Judeo-Persian is very similar to standard Classical Persian, except being written in Hebrew script. There are many valuable literary texts in Late Judeo-Persian, including those composed by the two most famous Iranian Jewish poets Shāhīn-i Shīrāzī (14th century) and ʿImrānī (15th century).4
Judeo-Persian letters from Bamiyan
The Bamiyan Papers are a collection of unprovenanced documents from Ghaznavid- and Ghurid-era Bamiyan (early 11th to early 13th centuries). They were brought out of Afghanistan under unknown circumstances, and some were later acquired by the NLI in two batches, in 2013 and 2016. This collection contains legal documents, letters and literary texts in Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew, as well as in Persian in Perso-Arabic script. Particularly noteworthy among them are fragments written in Early Judeo-Persian - very varied in their contents. Among them one can find literary, medical, and theological texts, as well as business and private letters. These letters belonged to the family and circle of Yehuda b. Daniel, an influential Jewish magnate who lived in Bamiyan in the first half of the 11th century (i.e. in the early Ghaznavid period). They attest to his family’s business and personal connections, and their close study will yield important results not only for research on the Persian language of the period but also for the understanding of the social and private life in the region in the early 11th century. The longest letter in the set has been published by Ofir Haim in 2012, but the rest are as yet unpublished (I am editing and preparing for publication the remaining letters, which will hopefully come out next year – R.N.). One of these letters is the subject of this Document of the Month.
The manuscript
NLI Ms.Heb.8333.207=4 measures 28.3 × 24.7 cm. It is inscribed on both sides: the recto contains the main text of the letter (Figure 1), and the verso contains the ending of the letter, in a fragmentary condition, and an address, written upside down in relation to the main text (Figure 2). The right side of the recto is torn, with the damage increasing towards the bottom. Similarly, the bottom part of the letter is missing, rendering the letter incomplete. Unfortunately, no line survives intact. At the top, two or three words are missing from each line, with the number increasing to four or five words in the lower half of the letter. The last three surviving lines on recto are fragmented, with tears on both the left and right, further diminishing their legibility.
It was customary to vertically flip the paper after one has finished writing on the recto side, and to continue the letter on the reverse, writing from the opposite direction. Thus, what had been the bottom of the recto, would become the top of the verso. Unfortunately, because of this, the ending of the letter is also in a very fragmentary state and not much can be made out of it.
Upside down on the verso side, we have the names of the sender (left column) and the recipient (right column), written parallel to each other. As the left edge of the verso is missing, the name of the sender is preserved only partially. Luckily, we can read the initial letter of his name as well as his patronymic, S... b. Yaʿqūb-i Slīman. Given that it was not uncommon to name a child after their grandfather, the name may be tentatively reconstructed as S[līman] b. Yaʿqūb-i Slīman.5
Fig. 2: NLI, Ms.Heb.8333.207=4 verso. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Israel. “Ktiv” Project.
The letter and its contents
The letter was sent by S[līman] b. Yaʿqūb-i Slīman to Abū-l-Ḥasan Siman Tov b. Yehuda, to whom and whose father Yehuda b. Daniel the majority of surviving Judeo-Persian documents in the Bamiyan Papers seem to have belonged. The sender identifies himself as a friend of Abū-l-Ḥasan, but the generally servile tone of the letter pushes us to assume that there was a status gap between them. This comes as no surprise, given that Siman Tov was the son of one of the most (if not the most) influential regional magnates in early 11th-century Bamiyan, as we learn from other surviving documents penned by Yehuda b. Daniel and the circle of his relatives and agents.6
The surviving text of the letter can be divided into six parts:
Recto :
Lines 1–5. Greetings and praise of the recipient, who is called “master and teacher”.
Lines 6–10. The sender enquires about a letter he previously sent to the recipient and to which he did not get a response.
Lines 11–15. The sender enquires about an epistolary issue pertaining to a letter he received from someone’s father, in which the customary greetings had been omitted.
Lines 16–17. The beginning of another discussion concerning some financial issues. Since it is in the lower part of the letter, only a few words are preserved.
Verso :
Lines 1–8. The ending of the letter, which survives very partially because the upper part of the verso is torn.
Upside down. Lines 1–2. The names of the recipient (right column) and the sender (left column).
In the best-preserved part of the letter (recto, lines 6–15) there seems to be a discussion of two issues. Firstly, the sender appears to have sent an earlier letter and, having not received an answer, wonders whether the letter has not reached Siman Tov – who is called khwāja “master” throughout the letter – or if Siman Tov has intentionally left it unanswered. He asks: “I do not know for what reason it was: did the letter not arrive, or did he7 not want to (write a response)?” Having reassured Siman Tov of his sincere devotion, the author then turns to discussing an issue related to someone’s father. This is in all likelihood the father of Abū-l-Ḥasan Siman Tov himself, i.e. Yehuda b. Daniel, as he is mentioned in a very respectful manner (line 11: “may God perpetuate his dignity”) and without being directly named. This more or less direct inquiry about another member of the family may imply that the sender stood in close connection to the family and was one of the agents working for Siman Tov and his father. This time the author is concerned that “the letter that ... the (most virtuous) father, may God perpetuate his dignity, had written to me, he had not written the greetings...”. This issue is not as trivial as it might appear, as this small gesture could have signaled that the author had fallen out of favor.
Despite all this, the main purpose of writing this letter seems to have been financial, as is suggested by lines 16–17. Unfortunately, being in the lower, lost part of the letter this section has not survived well. One gets a sense of its original contents only from the phrase “you send gold” on line 16. Perhaps the talk is about some investment suggested by the sender; alternatively, he may have been asking for financial support.
Some interesting features of the letter
The language of the letter is very similar to standard Classical Persian (with the exception of the conjunction kū ‘that’), and it is written in a very neat handwriting. Throughout the text a number of Arabic religious benedictions stand out that are written in Arabic script, e.g., “may God make him happy” (recto, line 6), “may God perpetuate his dignity” (recto, line 11), etc. (Figure 3). I have marked them with bold characters in the edition, to distinguish them from the Hebrew-script text.8
Fig. 3: Detail of NLI, Ms.Heb.8333.207=4 recto, showing Arabic religious formulae written in Arabic script. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Israel. “Ktiv” Project.
While it is not uncommon to see words in Arabic script inserted here and there in Judeo-Persian texts both from the Cairo Geniza and the Bamiyan Papers, it is interesting that the writer of our letter adhered to the rule of writing the benedictions almost exclusively in the original Arabic script. This aligns well with a similar phenomenon described by Shaul Shaked, who considered it to be a characteristic feature of the Khuzestani variety of Early Judeo-Persian.9 Shaked, who at the time of writing the article in 2011 did not have access to the Bamiyan material, explained it as a peculiarity that could only have existed in a majority Arabic-speaking environment, i.e. Egypt, where members of the Iranian-Jewish community “treated Judaeo-Persian as a Jewish language, to be written in Hebrew characters, while the phrases in Arabic script were considered to be quotations from the predominant non-Jewish language, namely Arabic.” However, our letter testifies that writing Arabic formulae in Arabic script was also practiced in Jewish circles in the Eastern Iranian lands. At the current stage of research, this custom appears to reflect a certain biliteracy among Iranian Jews (to the best of my knowledge this phenomenon was less prevalent among Judeo-Arabic-speaking communities). This is further supported by the practice of writing seemingly random words in the Perso-Arabic script, of which the present letter has only one example (اما on recto, line 10). This demonstrates that the convention of writing Persian in Hebrew characters in non-religious contexts was a conscious choice, which did not stem from a lack of mastery of the Arabic script.
Another interesting feature of the letter is the use of the phrase mr w rb (recto, line 2), an abbreviation of the Aramaic expression marana ve-rabbana, “our master and teacher”.10 This abbreviation (sometimes in the form mr w r) is frequently used in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew letters in the Cairo Geniza when addressing eminent members of society, such as scholars or rabbis. Some examples can be found in Bodl. MS heb. b 11/22 (ca. 1145–48, Judeo-Arabic, verso, address, line 2); T-S 13J26.3 (ca. 1050, Hebrew, verso, address in Judeo-Arabic, line 1); Moss. IV,10 (ca. 1035, Hebrew, verso, address, line 2). Its usage in our letter might imply that the addressee was also viewed in that way.
Final remarks
Even a brief comparison between Jewish documents in the Bamiyan Papers and in the Cairo Geniza shows that the Jewish community of Afghanistan formed – whether directly, or as is more likely through the mediation of the Jewish community of southern Iran – part of the wider Jewish business, scholarly and letter-writing culture that extended westward to the Mediterranean. I have little doubt that a deeper examination of this question will allow this connection to be demonstrated more decisively and thoroughly.
Notes
1 This term was coined by the Invisible East project, see Haim 2023:201.
2 https://www.nli.org.il/he/manuscripts/NNL_ALEPH990039250420205171/NLI#$FL45509256
3 For a description of its grammar, see Paul 2013; on the varieties of Early Judeo-Persian, see Shaked 2009. Shaked’s classification of the available Early Judeo-Persian material into five groupings needs to be updated in light of the new material from Bamiyan.
4 The first scholar to study these poets was Wilhelm Bacher (Bacher 1907–1908); for partial translations see Moreen 2013.
5 Goitein 1973:66.
6 See Haim 2012; Haim 2023. For an example of a letter written by Yehuda b. Daniel see NLI, Ms.Heb.8333.35=4.
7 In Early Judeo-Persian letters, it was a common way of courtesy to address a person by using the 3rd person instead of 2nd person.
8 This follows the practice of Shaked 2011 and Haim 2012.
9 According to Shaked’s categorization, there are five discernable varieties of Early Judeo-Persian typical of the following areas: a. Khuzestan, b. Central Fars, c. Bukhara region, d. Chinese Turkestan, e. Afghanistan (Shaked 2009:450-451). In the variety of Khuzestan, it was common to write the formulaic Arabic phrases in Arabic script (Shaked 2011:322).
10 I thank Nadia Vidro (Invisible East) for her comments on the Aramaic and Hebrew expressions in the letter.
